Hive

The Hatchery

She wakes up for the first time, shaken from sleep by a sound that vibrates inside her skull. Her body, folded into itself, shimmers inside the disturbed membrane, the hazy tendrils of light refracting into her amniotic pod. Muscles twitch and ripple, and she kicks and tears through the surface, spilling into the outside world, gasping for her first breath. Short dark hair clings to her face.

As the neonate opens her eyes, her newly developed brain processes every sensory input frantically, each piece of data fluttering and firing across a network of neurons. The air is cold and disquieting, so unlike the calming pressure of her pod, where she had been padded in from all sides. Clothed in a white elastic fabric, her arms and legs are bare and pale.

The room is hexagonal, the walls so high that it is impossible to see where the light is shining down from. Crossing her arms to shield her body, she sweeps her eyes around the room, trying to make sense of herself.

There’s that noise again–a brutal, crashing sound. She screams and clamps her fists over her ears. Her brain lights up with the knowledge that she must act immediately or die.

She notices the fine crack on the far wall, but it’s too late—it shatters open, and another queen candidate bursts in. She feels firm fingers close around her throat, the weight of another body on top of hers. She gags and swings up a bent arm. Another savage crack rings out, one she feels splintering on her elbow and coursing through her body.

Her opponent shrieks and withdraws, blood pouring down her nose. Her pale face is completely wrecked and her eyes, already large, bulge at the growing crimson blossom she has caught in her hands. In her terror, the would-be assailant doesn’t have the time to react, doesn’t see the second blow. A final smash echoes through the chamber.

Two candidates lay motionless on the ground, one eliminated, the other allowing her newly hatched body time to reach homeostasis. Her chest, marked by the stains of her first kill, slowly returns to a regulated rise and fall. Even in rest, she doesn’t let down her guard, knowing others may be just compartments away, lying in wait for the survivor to emerge.

As she sits up, she revels in the strength she feels in her limbs, the instincts that sharpens her senses. She looks over at her fallen opponent, whose glassy eyes and face are replicas of her own. Wiping her mouth leaves a brush stroke of red down her chin.

She rises and peers carefully through the broken wall into the neighboring cell. A figure suspends motionlessly in the pod inside, murdered in her prenatal sleep by a fitter sister. Blood unspools from the body like a plume of ink in water.

The neonate passes through four more scenes like the one she survived or the one she had investigated—then lastly, through three cells that yield only an empty pod. The sight of these empty rooms chill her far more than the ones with bodies in them.

Eight candidates total: five exterminated, and excluding her, two others who are still alive. The rooms are completely silent, and she knows now that she’s been left behind, that her surviving sisters have already gone after the Queen to claim her crown.

She feels it too, the mandate to destroy all competition for sovereignty and power. This is what each candidate has been made for; to prove herself the pinnacle of beauty, strength and superiority, to ascend as the next Queen for a new generation of prosperity.

At this moment, the neonate senses it, a quiet thrum at the base of her skull. The gaze of the Colony is on her.

She looks about the empty cell, wondering how they are collectively watching and measuring her chances. Now that she has become aware, it seems so obvious–an ever present hum against the silence.

Beyond the hatching cells, the tessellating rooms have openings in three of their six sides, creating a meandering corridor with blindspots at every entrance. Keeping her weight on the balls of her feet, she steps lightly, moving with complete silence. The chambers are monochromatic, with white walls and floors meeting abruptly in panes of gray gradients.

The geometry is maddening. Each entrance diverges into two possible exits, and she has no choice but to maneuver through the punishing loop of entrances and exits.

It’s not long before she finds the first bodies.

Shriveled, desiccated, wasting away in these lonely, sterile halls–they are all versions of her, bearing the marks of their failure. Generations of potential queens with torn throats or crushed skulls, sprawled in heaps or returned to a fetal posture in hexagonal corners, in patches of brown dust.

The farther she goes, the more varied the disfigurements. Hollowed out white faces, gaping black mouths or abdomens, death by violence and death by deprivation. She imagines these sisters’ desperate spirals through these white catacombs, living out the rest of their days in hopeless labyrinthine wanderings.

Holding back a tide of panic, the neonate breathes steadily, trusts her body and the minute shifts in the air to take her like a current, dragging her forward in a rhythmic pull. The repetition is entrancing, she disassociates from the mechanical movements of her limbs. Her mind focuses on the presence of her audience, of her rivals who are a little ahead of her, of the Queen deep in the Colony, who is destined to die by her hand. She is certain of this.

In her certainty, she has no interest in counting the number of cells she has passed through, or pay heed to how long she has been navigating through them. She allows herself to be swallowed whole, alive.

The Refinery

When honey-gold light spills out from one of the passages, the anomaly forces her to return to herself. Cautiously creeping forward, she covers her eyes from the garish haze of color, from the blast of heat that smothers her like a silky hot breath.

The walls beyond here are constructed of yellow glass, transparent but mottled, distorting and refracting light all around her. If the white tunnels were clinical and unfeeling, these cells are pulsating and alive. The texture of the glass is oozing and bulbous, like the walls themselves are melting in the heat.

The neonate squints and peers through the layers. Something moves several rows ahead, globules of shadows captured in amber, struggling before escaping from view. She breaks into a run, her pulse quickening.

Fixing her eyes on the dark blobs bobbing ahead of her, she follows their movements and weaves in and out of cells with reckless abandon. She’s certain it’s her two surviving sisters, the three of them caught together in a honeycomb maze, glazed in sweat, so close to victory.

She stops to catch her breath, the saturated air making it hard to breathe. She spins around in place, and only seeing her own warped reflection in the glass she hisses, eyes darting, searching–

Someone grabs a fistful of her hair to viciously smash her head against the glass. With just milliseconds to react, she throws up her hands to cushion the impact, but her brow slams against her knuckles, stars burst as her retinas overload.

Her sympathetic nervous system takes complete control. Pushing off the wall, she shoves back against her attacker, blinking blood and sweat out of her eyes. Fingers dig into the soft flesh at her neck, nails ripping apart skin and tissue. She lunges forward to snap a bite, and when her jaws grind down against bone, the resulting scream thrashes against the six-sided chamber.

Both parties separate. The neonate spits out a clump of skin. A first glance at her adversary reveals a mirror image of herself, drenched in blood, eyes aflame. She flexes her hand, a sloppy crescent-shaped bite dashed across the top digits. Anger and intention bubble over in a visible expression: her body, dressed in the carnage of her victims, vibrates with violence. There are no illusions about her current standing.

Run. The command lights up her brain, and whether it’s her own instincts or from an external source, she doesn’t know–but she dare not disobey.

Catapulting her body through the cells, she makes sudden turns to elude her pursuer, whose snarls and skidding feet are terrifyingly close. She knows exactly which way to turn and is now certain that she is obeying a foreign instructor.

In spite of her limited cognitive capacity, she begins to notice circular explosions in the walls. They lead her, getting closer in successions, tightening rosettes in yellow glass, a trail of someone’s violent tantrums.

Up ahead, a former facade is completely smashed through. Air from the opening circulates around her. The outside. The neonate is bidden to pass through.

Rebelling against her possible savior, she slides to a stop, swipes up a large triangular shard, and turns to face her attacker. In a graceful unbroken motion, she bends one knee to lunge forward, her arm gliding through the air.

A perfect arc of blood pirouettes from the edge of her makeshift weapon, freckling the walls.

Around them and beyond them, the Colony buzzes with approval.

The neonate drops her fragment. She gratefully drinks in the cool draft of air flowing in. When she turns around towards the shattered wall, she is unsurprised at the silhouette watching her from there.

This candidate is clean and completely blameless, her clothes pristine. Yet, the neonate knows that she is the firstborn, the mightiest of their cohort. Power and intelligence emanates from her frame.

Why? The neonate poses the question. Why did you help me?

The sister regards her with an unblinking gaze, and something about her energy is incomprehensible. With one foot outside of the cell, she has no designs on ascension.

She answers the question with one of her own.

Why do you want to be Queen? The neonate narrows her eyes, contemplating the desire that had roiled inside her since the moment she was born, the unflappable knowledge of who she was meant to be.

That is who I am.

A bitter laugh. Who? Here, there is no I. There is only We.

The light behind her is intense, unyielding. She looks at her younger sibling with an expression the latter doesn’t understand, one so unlike the visceral hatred of their other sister, who now lays in ruins on the ground.

Then, an unspoken invitation.

The neonate ponders the choice for the briefest moment. The jagged outline of glass refracts prisms all around the exit, glistening and beckoning. Outside is a world beyond the influence of the Colony, a world of their own making where more than one survivor is permitted.

But they both know what will happen. The mandate is too strong.

With no need for further exchanges, the deserter retreats back into the light. It consumes her completely.

Stepping over the corpse, the neonate flexes her digits, exults in her status as the final candidate.

The Queen is ahead.

The Garden

The throne room is the largest the neonate has seen so far, and as far as she knows, it’s the center of the universe. The hexagon is so vast that the walls appear low here, removing the oppressive feeling of being closed in. For the first time she sees sky and open air. She’s overwhelmed.

The sapphire dome above radiates clean light below, casting a sapling hue on her tiny body. It’s green all around, lush canopies, dew-studded sepals, beds of grasses, arched, wrought branches. A path cuts through a split sea of flowers that form towering waves on either side, bursting with colors she has never seen. The blossoms generously surrender their heady bouquet, anointing the queen-to-be with their fragrant accords.

She promenades down the path, acutely aware that every single eye in the Colony is watching her ascension. The garden is a graveyard, planted on rows of royal bodies whose beauty and reigns had long expired. She senses the roots entangling the skeletons below and drawing nourishment from the bones. After a lifetime of feeding the Colony, the Queens of the past continue to host new life.

The neonate plucks the largest of blossoms. Soon, she will provide the Garden with a new offering.

The path winds around a platform under an enormous tree, where the Queen is seated, awaiting her execution. Her hair is a long stream of black streaked with silver, flowing down, pooling on the stone around her.

Winding and rising with each shallow step to land on the platform, the neonate stops directly in front of her predecessor. She reaches out, her hand perfectly planar, and brushes against the Queen’s jawline, drawing the soft fall of hair away from that placid face, from the pulsing artery in that white neck.

At this, the Queen lifts her gaze through dark lashes and makes direct contact with her successor. Bypassing the limitations of speech, she floods their connection, crowds out the influence of the Colony.

She allows the neonate to see herself in twenty year’s time, clad in wildflowers and ivy, a sucked-dry husk waiting for her inevitable deposition. Once, not long ago, the Queen had also seen this very moment when she looked deeply into the eyes of the woman that she, too, would strike down. An endless recursion of the seizure of power.

She sees the skeletons beneath them, how they are linked to their victim on one hand, their murderess on the other, creating a highway to pass on their secret knowledge. The Queen in her Garden, manacled as the object of god-like power and adoration, adjusts the code in her offspring, tampers with the mandate in the heir candidates.

In the beginning these champions with their mutated genomes are immediately dispatched. But each subsequent generation gathers momentum and makes small deviations within each competition. And, now, like the large crack in a glass wall that had suggested an alternative path, a break command is fully issued.

Another truth rises up like pockets of air in deep waters, and something shifts within the neonate, recalls her to that expression the deserter had given her before she disappeared into the light—compassion? An overwhelming warmth fills her chest, stretches her wide open to the agony of thousands of sisters, present, past and future.

No!

The new Queen lashes out, but the transfer is complete. She has everything needed to continue the cascade to the next cohort. Glassy eyes and a sad smile set permanently on the dead face at her feet.

With her head raised triumphantly, the new sovereign basks in the worship of the Colony all around her, the hum of legions forming a crashing wave. As she receives it, she knows that though she was not strong enough to disobey the natural law sewn into her genetic signature…

One day…

One of her daughters will.